A.G. Gancarski
On Wednesday afternoon, some small but important steps were made toward accomplishing something essential in Jacksonville: making the contracts process more transparent.
Councilman Tommy Hazouri, a former mayor and probably the most dyed-in-the-wool populist on the current Council, scheduled a meeting with Council Vice-President Lori Boyer, who has as much experience with contracts on the current Council as anyone, to discuss how to make contracts that the city is engaged in more transparent to citizens, and Jacksonville’s Chief Administrative Officer Sam Mousa, who worked in the Hazouri administration and who knows as much about the post-Consolidation era as anyone alive today.
A great working group, to be sure.
Going into the meeting, Hazouri had laid out the following specifications for how to accomplish this.
One such: a keyword-searchable online Depository for contracts in the form of an index on the website for all contracts over $25,000 starting January 2016. This would include date, amount, vendor, purpose and time period of contract and extensions thereof.
Another requirement: an easy way to request the full version of a digital contract, with the end goal of having something similar to what Jeff Atwater brought to the state of Florida.
Another spec: that sole source and proprietary contracts be available online indefinitely.
For Hazouri, the goal was simple. The transparency of all contracts. Something that other cities seem to have accomplished. And an area in which Jacksonville lags, not just behind major cities, but also behind Ocala and other cities not on the level of The Bold New City of the South.
City Council Chief of Research Jeff Clemens was tasked with researching how this was done elsewhere. To sum up, there are many ways to accomplish the goals Hazouri wants, allowing as much or as little info as desired on the site.
Another element that got brought up: the consistent weakness of contract management, going back a few years. Contracts in various departments may have elapsed, and the lack of effective oversight creates headaches for those charged with ensuring fidelity to those contracts, and the city’s bargaining position.
This was specifically an issue in Parks and Recreation, where at one point a staggering 80% of contracts had elapsed without departmental knowledge. This spotlights a larger issue for the city: contract management, including the terms of the contract, as well as ensuring that all parties are satisfying the terms thereof, so that vendors aren’t paid substantially before substantial completion of the terms of the agreement, protecting against delinquency, and so on.
Beyond issues with procurement contracts, non-procurement contracts (such as zoning and grant issues) have proven unwieldy and rife with issues as well.
There are internal mechanisms for oversight. Contracts are searchable via vendor on FAMIS, but that is an internal system without ready public access.
Mousa cited the evolution of the Department of Transportation process as a positive example. Time was, he said, folks had to drive out to Lake City (which this writer can’t personally recommend) and participate in the bid process.
Now, he says, one can do everything from his desk.
For Hazouri, the call is to “modernize,” and to fulfill the dictums of accessibility and transparency that, ironically enough, were big factors in the push toward Consolidated government a half century ago.
The Chief Administrative Officer is, conceptually at least, on board.
“This is the kind of stuff the mayor and I are working on,” Mousa said.
Things have improved, Mousa added, but there is lots of room for further progress.
“A lot of discipline has been lost over the last four years,” Mousa said.
“It drives me nuts.”
While it remains to be seen whether a bill will emerge from Wednesday’s public notice meeting, what was clear was that two influential members of Council and Mayor Curry’s right hand man both agree that there is room for improvement, both in terms of contract oversight on the COJ’s part, and transparency of contracts for citizens.
The contract oversight piece would have tangible benefits for the city’s coffers, necessary as it wrestles with issues like UF Health, port dredging, and the unfunded liability of the police and fire pension plan.
Transparency, meanwhile, would have intangible benefits, in terms of restoring the public trust.
